The Boston Globe du lieu suivant : Boston, Massachusetts • 199

ONLINE BOSTON.COMCITYWEEKLY Cnftw Wmm GlobeWatch: Got a problem? I Citv Talk: Messaae board E-mail: Reporters and editors Caption Contest For laughs SN DAY lOSTON Globe, August 20, 2006 omm soon to 1 near you? ft Cimex 'f lectularius (bedbug) $500 The maximum fine landlords can face per day for not ridding their properties of bedbugs. $1,000 The estimated cost an Allston landlord says he incurred for exterminating one apartment of bedbugs over just a three-week period. 12,700 The price one Brighton tenant says her family paid for living with bedbugs, including lost wages, moving expenses, and having to buy new furniture. For more and more Bostonians, bedbugs are no longer bedtime myths, but sleep-robbing realities. Next month, in response: a bedbug summit.

SOURCES: Interviews, legal cases, and city records PHOTO: David Almquist, University of Florida I UBi (. lic housing development, she says, after the bedbugs invaded those, too. Gone, as well, are the guests she entertained on that couch ensemble. She's ashamed to invite them in, she says. "Right now," says Ramos in Spanish through an interpreter who sits on a paint bucket, "I can't take it anymore." With her fingernails, she attacks a connect-the-dots series of bedbug bites on her right arm, but pauses at the thought the scratching will leave scars.

Her mind returns to the kitchen. "I have nowhere to go. I don't want this kind oflifeformykids." A battalion of bedbugs is marching through Boston, turning people's nightsheets, and their daily lives, inside out. According to a database of cases compiled since 2002 by the city's Inspectional Services Department, their pace is quickening: about three-quarters of Boston's bedbug cases have been reported in the last two years or so. The parasites have left their trail of blood-flecked sheets in virtually every neighborhood of the Hub, from Roxbury to West Roxbury, the South End to South Boston, Brighton to Beacon Hill.

To amplify the stubborn realities of bedbugs, a regional conference is set for Sept. 16 at Bunker Hill Community BEDBUGS, Page 7 ByRicKahn GLOBE STAFF Mealtime tiptoes into the home of Carmen Ramos. Three of her children, Ezequiel, 6, Eliezel, 4, and Naicha, almost 2, quietly settle in beside one another, each of them spooning clusters of Honey Bunches of Oats with Real Strawberries out of brightly colored plastic bowls. The Mds are sitting upright, in a row, down on the kitch-en floor. Carmen Ramos used to have a sweet dinette set.

But she purged it from her apart- How to keep the bedbugs ment, she says, after the from biting. Page 7 bedbugs took it over. Her oldest child, 12-year-old Samuel, is absent today, frolicking at summer camp. He once spent nights for over a year sleeping in a bathtub, Ramos says, convinced that the cast-iron vessel was one of the only places where the bedbugs could not Getting teary, Ramos, 33, moves into the living room and finds a place to rest. She slowly folds her body and descends onto the uncarpeted floor.

Ramos used to have a sofa of gold, burgundy, and black, with matching love seat and chair. But she had to cast them away from her flat in Roxburs Whittier Street pub in- I i urn) I rtopi fur. I COMFFR I CHIMTHFS WSH It KOt rfKN T. A Day-Glo sticker warning that curbside castoffs may hold parasitic bedbugs. CAMBRIDGE An artfully inexpensive bid to slow speeders 1 IFWTfj winy jw 'ifriw I -a -j i a I 1 4 ROXBURY To Wilkerson, latest fight just part of quest ByMichaelJonas GLOBE CORRESPONDENT Nothing in life has been handed to Dianne Wilkerson, and her reelection to an eighth term in the state Senate looms as no exception.

After failing to submit enough valid nominating signatures to appear on the September primary ballot, she has been forced to mount a write-in campaign 'We've got to just to keep her seat. More signifi- 5UtK VVlUl cant, the slip-up has created an opening for a Juan Tennyson Democratic pri- Wilkerson supporter mary challenger, Sonia Chang-Diaz, who has jumped into the write-in fray, joining Republican Sami-yah Diaz, who had already launched her campaign to upend Wilkerson. Both challengers are swinging away at Wilkerson, trying to convince voters that a trail of transgressions the Roxbury lawmaker has left in her wake means it's time TRAIL, Page 8 ziS -Ml' 7 IWa By Janice OXeary GLOBE CORRESPONDENT The city of Cambridge sees its latest installation of public art as potentially traffic-stopping. Or, at least, traffic-calming. This month, local artist Wen-ti Tsen put the finishing touches on the mural white, green, and red dashes in a 20-foot-diameter blue circle he painted on the pavement at the busy intersection of Walden Street and Vassal Lane, pleasing neighbors and pedestrians, but angering some drivers.

"One man swore at me," said Tsen. "Even when I explained what I was doing, he said it was a stupid idea" Ah, but he slowed down, didn't he? For the public works department, the mural might represent a brushstroke of genius. Juan Avendano, the traffic-calming project manager in the Environmental and Transportation Division, had heard about street murals painted in Portland, for aesthetics, which had the unintended consequence of easing traffic as drivers paused to look at the work. Residents on Walden Street had MURAL, Page 6 W.f 7 vfr 1' Lsifec-- L' Vn.mi.ili DAVID L. RVANGLOBt STAFF A driver slows as Wen-ti Tsen sweeps his mural at the intersection of Walden Street and Vassal Lane 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 II 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 I 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 i 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 II 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Inside Snakes on a train, er, the Caption contest, Page 2...

Fate of crumbling columns at Franklin Park Zoo towers in the air, Page 3. Engine running? Don't get out: Who Taught YOU to drive, Page 5... Ode to the joy of softball in the chy. Page 10 Full Index, Page 2.